An RV10 is much, much quicker than that.
LeSving wrote:
Wreck is a strong word.
It wasn’t mine, it was yours. I merely replied to your statement that most planes in this price range are wrecks.
LeSving wrote:
Microlight/experimental: 50h per year and zero maintenance, but let’s say 250 € for new “tires and brakes”.
Zero maintenance? You mean you don’t maintain the Microlights or experimentals on a regular basis? Is that what you are saying?
LeSving wrote:
Maintenance vise they are like night and day, the Safir can hardly fly a couple of hours without a snag of some kind
Then it is not properly maintained. If airplanes do develop snags like that all the time, then it would be time to seriously see what is amiss.
My own experience is very different. In the last 5 years my unscheduled maintenance of a 50 year old plane caused by the age of compontents or the plane was to replace the battery and new tyres, as well as replacing the fuel drains during scheduled maintenance. Since the engine was overhauled in 2010, we had to change one defective spark plug and had a failure of a 1 year old voltage regulator of the alternator. Other than that we had no snags which just developed out of thin air.
If regular maintenance is performed properly and found defects are addressed during that regular maintenance, there is NO reason why an airplane should deteriorate in the way you say unless the pilots flying them are careless. Maybe that is why many of us decided to have their own plane in order not having to put up with the way club airplanes are handled by the membership. When I see the log of the local club about snags, 99% of those are not because of “old planes” but because pilots screw up using them. Connecting 28V to a 12V airplane, flat spotting tyres, leaving the master switch on, starting the engines with avionics on, you name it. None of these are defects related to the age of the airplanes.
Other than that, I agree with mh, you are biased against certified airplanes. That is fine, nobody tells you that you have to fly certified airplanes if the microlights or experimentals you fly satisfy YOUR needs. Just leave some tolerance for people who think differently.
The biggest ‘take away’ (Peter will like my use of fashionable business lingo 
) I get from this discussion is that aircraft flown lots of hours by multiple pilots need frequent maintenance, and it’s hard to keep up without spending a lot of money on people who are standing by to work and get paid. So a lot of money gets spent on those planes and they tend to degrade in condition over calendar time. With that in mind, I remain convinced the the best ownership solution is one man, one aircraft, 50 or 100 hrs total a year, particularly as lower prices for nice planes is making that more viable – which is the subject of this thread. The aircraft is flown enough but doesn’t require work so frequently that a caring and involved owner can’t keep up.
The Experimental versus certified, new versus old issues do not seem very important in relation to the issue maintaining complicated versus simple aircraft. Buy one you can manage. All planes need a little bit of work to keep them in constant condition…mine apparently broke its vacuum pump this morning, I’ll be looking at it tomorrow, but I had a great flight.
Some places it’s harder to negotiate the legalities and sign-offs but given determination and contacts, it’s a negotiable situation almost anywhere. Same thing with a hangar to work in. The one thing beyond that, that I might insert is that if you and more to the point your plane are more interesting to airplane people, you generally have an easier time finding help when you need it. Better than being a ‘cookie cutter’ customer with a boring plane.
mh wrote:
And that is a pity, because exactly those claims of horrific certified ownership costs would be one reason of people backing off from doing the kind of flying they like.
Exactly.
mh wrote:
If your aero club mechanic is so much worse than any owner, maybe there lies your problem
Exactly my sentiment. An aeroclub whose airplanes develop snags without stop should wonder why that is so rather than assume that it is just the old airplanes which are.
And I would also question the way the airplanes are treated by the pilots who fly them if they keep breaking under the strain. People who constantly break things in airplanes should not be allowed to continue flying them. Either they treat the planes they fly like their own or they should be thrown out of the club.
mh wrote:
And you still haven’t explained, why your RV don’t need to change oil and filter, check the spark plugs, control rod tensions, etc.
Maybe that explains why the airplanes end up in such a shape so they need to get sold before they disintegrate?
DavidJ wrote:
An RV10 is much, much quicker than that.
And a C172 is somewhat slower
mh wrote:
You must be joking. We’re not talking about a FR172RG.
That has nothing to do with it. A Cessna-172 is a complex design, complicated to build, with a myriad of parts and special jigs are needed for all and everything. Let’s say you damaged the horizontal stabilizer beyond repair. On an RV-10 you can put a new one together on a weekend or less by parts from Vans. On a C-172 you have to purchase a new one at 20x the cost.
mh wrote:
Around 50k including a paintjob.
You can’t even upgrade the panel to modern standard for 50k on a C-172. In the hangar close to our hangar, a mechanic did a complete tear down on a “wreck” of a C-172 he got for nothing. Building it up from its parts, making new ones where needed or getting OK old ones. It was all done in his spare time, but he used a couple of years on it. There is no way he can ever hope to get back all the work he used to fix it up if he sells it, but he now is the owner of a C-172 that is probably better than it was when new.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Exactly my sentiment. An aeroclub whose airplanes develop snags without stop should wonder why that is so rather than assume that it is just the old airplanes which are.
What?? That is the major point here, and what this discussion is all about. You have no control of what an old aircraft have been going through of abuse and neglect, and therefore it is literally impossible to upgrade it to new standard without a complete tear down. A 50k “refurbishment” simply is not enough. This is the main reason why a new Cessna is so much better than an old one, and why we want newer planes. Planes do degrade over time, believing they don’t is just fooling yourself. The maintenance has to be intensified as time goes. With a newer plane you have control of how things develop, so the whole process can be done with as little cost as possible, while at the same time keeping the availability at a high level. I guess Peter’s oldish plane would be a good purchase, one of the very few, because he (by the looks of it) take real responsibility of keeping it in tip top shape. But how many does that? For most people maintenance is a cost they want to minimize by all means. They just hand it over to the cheapest certified “organisation” they can find at each annual, with the naive notion that it will be “like new” when it comes back. It’s the latter category of planes we do not want, at least not older than 5-7 years, because they will be too costly to maintain. Then keep in mind that most aircraft has been neglected like that for 30-50 years.
Silvaire wrote:
The biggest ‘take away’ (Peter will like my use of fashionable business lingo ) I get from this discussion is that aircraft flown lots of hours by multiple pilots need frequent maintenance, and it’s hard to keep up without spending a lot of money on people who are standing by to work and get paid. So a lot of money gets spent on those planes and they tend to degrade in condition over calendar time. With that in mind, I remain convinced the the best ownership solution is one man, one aircraft, 50 or 100 hrs total a year, particularly as lower prices for nice planes is making that more viable – which is the subject of this thread. The aircraft is flown enough but doesn’t require work so frequently that a caring and involved owner can’t keep up.
There is some sense in this, but it requires as a very minimum that we get rid of these “maintenance organisation” nonsense and get back the local freelance mechanic with authority. That would also greatly improve the quality of maintenance because the owner would get more involved. The idea of maintenance is to maintain technical equipment, not satisfy some bureaucratic regulations.
Let’s say you damaged the horizontal stabilizer beyond repair. On an RV-10 you can put a new one together on a weekend or less by parts from Vans.
Only if you are a metal basher with excellent and specialised skills and account for your time at zero value*
On a C-172 you have to purchase a new one at 20x the cost.
You make an insurance claim, surely?
* The recurring issue in these threads….
BTW how much is a RV HS? I know a Socata TB20 HS is €7k+VAT+painting.
@MH
you wrote:
“The Morane has annual costs of around 700€ for ARC, Avionics, Parts and Fluids.”
That sounds most reasonable. Any way to have a G-Reg Morane annualed at your shop?
LeSving wrote:
There is some sense in this, but it requires as a very minimum that we get rid of these “maintenance organisation” nonsense and get back the local freelance mechanic with authority.
It was written here several times, it is possible with a plane like the 172 (it’s one of the positive developments under EASA). You just seem to ignore it because it doesn’t suit your argument.
Peter wrote:
You make an insurance claim, surely?
Not on the RV-10, no way that would be cheaper. On the C-172 ? maybe, maybe not.
Peter wrote:
Only if you are a metal basher with excellent and specialised skills and account for your time at zero value*
You keep repeating this. But that logic only makes sense if the flying you do is what you do for a living, and by using time fixing your plane, that time is subtracted from the earnings you could do as a pilot. You still have to fix the plane, and it’s not like you have a spare plane laying around that you can use in the mean time. It is your spare time we are talking about, and as such any time you use for other things than flying (like watching TV or fixing your plane) is money saved for more flying later.
There is no excellent and specialized skills needed to put together the horizontal tail on the RV-10. The parts are matched and pre-drilled with micrometer precision, even your mother can do it.
